There's something that swells the soul to watch some jerk who was totally asking for it get the jelly stomped out of him

You gotta love a good beatin'. There's just something that swells the soul to watch some jerk who was totally asking for it get the jelly stomped out of him, in public and, if at all possible, without any warning at all.

That's why the President of Columbia University is my new best friend.

The beating he threw Iran's Maximum Whackjob, President Mahmoud Ahmydinnerjacket! was thing of joy and beauty.

For those of you who don't follow the Dinnerjacket's adventures as closely as moi, let's recap. The would-be Bond villain with the poorly hidden secret nuclear bomb project has been in the US this week to do a late supper show at the fabulous Club UN.

Originally he was just gonna work his old material for the fans. You know, bang the podium with a dusty slipper, demand the extermination of the Jews by cleansing atomic fire, deny the attempted extermination of the Jews by the Nazis ever happened, and refute any nonsense about his secret cleansing atomic fire program being in any way related to the much needed cleansing of the verminous Jews by Allah's righteous thermonuclear thunderbolts. And maybe, just maybe, if time permitted, what with all the holy fire cleansing and the podium slapping, maybe he'd get a chance to take in a lap dance at Tin Tin's favourite tittay bar and try his luck with the chicky babes on the campus circuit... which is where it all went terribly pear-shaped.

He had a gig locked in to do his schtick at Columbia University, which had previously hosted improv headliners such as Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, President of Turkmenistan and Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, boss hog of the Republic of Malawi, who wowed the crowd with their naked wrestling bit from Borat. The Dinnerjacket was thinking this is cool, he's got a hip audience, he can do some edgy stuff, and who knows, these filthy white college sluts have a bad rep amongst the religious police back home. They might even give it up for a dude with a Fajr-3 rocket in his pocket.

So, it's all looking good when he strides into the belly of the Great Satan at the start of the week. It's looking even better when Columbia's President Lee Bollinger starts getting hammered by boneheaded knuckledraggers on the Right as a 'terrorist coddling liberal egghead' for letting the Jacket even turn up. Then he does turn up and Bollinger totally ambushes him.

Like, sidles up to the grinning, bearded goon and beats him to a pulp on stage.

If you can't, because of low bandwidth, here's some of my personal highlights.

"Let's then be clear at the beginning," said Bollinger during his welcoming speech. "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator... Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?..."

He beat him down for demanding the destruction of Israel. He beat him down for suppressing women, gays and intellectuals. And he beat him down for denying the Holocaust.

"In a December 2005 state television broadcast," said Bollinger, "you described the Holocaust as 'a fabricated legend.' One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers. For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda.
When you have come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. You should know ... that Columbia is the world centre of Jewish studies ... in partnership with the Institute of Holocaust Studies.
Since the 1930s, we provided an intellectual home for countless Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and grandchildren. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history. Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about the debate over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all of us who continue to fear humanity's capacity for evil shudder at this closure of memory, which is always virtue's first line of defence."

Bollinger kept beating him down until the Iranian President was reduced to his essence, a sad caricature of despot who suddenly finds himself in room full of people who aren't scared of him and don't believe a word he says. He looked pathetic and frightened, although probably not as much as the children who are regularly executed by his regime.

However, as much fun as it was to watch the Dinnerjacket getting his arse handed to him by a terrorist coddling liberal egghead, it was the egghead's words about the importance of letting him speak that stayed with me. We should put them on a plaque somewhere, a big iron plaque that we can pull out whenever some nimrod tries to argue that we weaken ourselves by listening to the enemy. You know, so we could smack 'em upside the head with it.

"This event has nothing whatsoever to do with any rights of the speaker," said Bollinger, "but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves. We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now. We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers. It ... is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil, and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament. In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self-restraint against the very natural but often counterproductive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear."

Bollinger went on to explain that herein lay the genius of the American idea of free speech, which was wrong, but only in the sense that he was being parochial. The freedom to speak and to think and to beat down a tyrant is not purely American. It was gifted to all free people thousands of years ago by Athens and the Greek city-states and in the end it is that freedom which makes us strong.

Anyway, if you enjoyed this mugging of a somewhat tattered and shabby-looking Dinnerjacket by Mr Bollinger you can get the full transcript here.

This city just doesn't get laneways. Me, I love 'em. Doesn't matter where I am, what city in the world, I do love diving down into an alley, poking around looking for a hash den, dodgy cafe or porno shack. And if you got all three, whoa, I'm movin' in, baby!

Right now, exiled to the southern burbs, the closest I got is Moorvale Lane, a shortened stub of an alley which does its best work after dark, when the lovely red glow of the porn shoppe infuses the dancing coloured bulbs of the Piccolino's pizza joint and for just a second, if you're not really paying attention, you could be anywhere in the world.

Just across from Piccolino's there's an Ethiopian Restaurant. I'll let you insert your own obvious jokes here. And at night a loose-limbed crew of Kenyans, Sudanese and, of course, Ethiopeople hang around drinking tea, smoking and freaking out anybody who doesn't realise that they're harmless.

Billy Thorpe used to sit on a milk crate just out on Beaudesert Road, and wrote the first of his rocking little ditties out there, perhaps encouraged by the expat American's who settled in the area after the war.

There was a big drug bust at the end of laneway recently, that nobody noticed.

And that's it. You want more? I got nuthin'.

Brisneyland just doesn't do backstreet mojo. Perhaps because the malign influence of beery yob culture is still so strong that nobody in their right minds would walk into a laneway around this town for fear of getting the jelly stomped out of them by a pack of drunken, disappointed Broncos fans. Or perhaps it's just that four decades of untrammelled, aesthetically worthless development in the CBD has crushed any semblance of life out of the place. Sydney suffers from the same problem, but not Melbourne, which famously brought its city centre back to life by the simple magic of encouraging life back into the long-deserted alleyways of the southern capital.

After an epic night on the tiles, there's nothing like folding yourself into the dimly lit otherworld of a Melbourne back street for a life saving coffee and greasy fry up.

And of course, old world cities often seem to be ninety percent alleyway, ruelle or illegale viuzza. They're great because in a megacity like London or Chicago they can become self-contained realms where everything falls back to an intimate human scale and no matter what the size of the hassle that ails you, in such a place at least, it seems manageable.

Where am I going with this?

Nowhere really. I just like laneways and alleys. If you know of any good ones, you can feel free to let me know all about them.

I'm home with kids for the next two weeks, and I could do with some vicarious excitement. I don't care where they are, as long as they're cool and they showed you a good time.

Oh, and props to regular Bluntgrrl, Nat, for the Moorvale lane happy snaps and some fascinating factoids.

One cannot have pretensions to mastering the universe when one is regularly undone by the likes of Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.

Getting your arse handed to you is a bracing experience; whether it be in a classroom, on a playing field, or in the backstreets of Baghdad. Makes you question some basic assumptions. Should I have put that slug in the teacher's lunch box? Did I need to pay more attention to location of the cowpat when I went racing for that failed catch down on the boundary? Was it really necessary to take the de-Baathification process in Iraq so far, purging even the lowliest dogcatcher just because he'd once had to wear a smiley face Saddam button to keep his job?

Perhaps the Michael Moores of the Left are wrong to blame everything on the greed and malfeasance of the Bush family. Perhaps the world would be a better a place - and its maximum superpower a happier camper - if Americans just played cricket.

Think of the benefits. Right now, their best and brightest would be in South Africa for the Twenty20 World Cup worried about getting their butts kicked by Pakistan, rather than in Pakistan, worried about a small thermo nuclear device getting smuggled through the Northwest Frontier and onto a container ship bound for New York.

For one cannot have pretensions to mastering the universe when one is regularly undone by the likes of Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe. When one fears the re-emergence of the Caribbean as a world power, one is likely to face the re-emergence of a caliphate in the old Ottoman Empire with equanimity. These things, like fumbled catches and ill fitting boxes - athletic protectors, for my American friends - are simply to be endured.

I would imagine the Twenty20 cup to be a perfect opportunity for seducing the average American away from rounders. It is after all a loud and vacuous frippery, full of sound, fury, movement, colour and silliness with a great deal of merchandising and marketing flim-flammery based directly on the American pro sports model. It's possible that with enough beer and the decay of the US public education system, many millions of our Pacific cousins wouldn't even notice the difference.

But what a difference it would make to their national psyche to be able to play a World Series against the rest of the world. To eventually slow down and take four or five whole days to decide a ball game, or not, if that is the way the tea biscuit crumbles. To learn the discipline, easily comprehended by a five-year-old boy here, of not bending one's arm when making a delivery, or 'pitch'. To enjoy for the first time the slightly malign delight of being able to bounce the ball before it reaches the batsman, or his head, if that is your intent. To learn not to be so obsessed about things that one cannot stop on a regular basis for drinks, lunch, afternoon tea, a spot of dinner and a few more drinks with one's groupies back at the team hotel, before resuming hostilities in the field.

How could American insularity possibly survive a touring schedule by their national team which saw them out of the country for up to five months a year? How far would it go towards defusing the situation in the Middle East for them to learn the greatest threat is not from the world's Muslims, but from the world's Muslim umpires, or maybe the fat Hindu one, you know, who had that terrible set-to with Mike Gatting a few years ago.

How dextrous would the American mind grow upon having to grapple with the idea of a bat that might be wielded with so much more fluidity and rapier-like deftness than the dumb, troglodytic club swing of a Barry Bonds? And of Bonds, how humble might they grow to consider the example of a Bradman, Hobbs or Sobers, when compared to such a problematic character.

Upon considering the manifest advantages of cricket over baseball I confess myself perplexed as to why old Uncle Sam has not embraced it.

Perhaps some of the Americans who do stray here from time to time might be able to explain themselves.

Thoughts while watching music videos, drinking heavily and wondering where my Thai home delivery got to.

New Order wrote the same song over and over and it sounded a lot like that song by that other band, possibly New Order.

Oh my God, Avril. Put some pants on.

Madonna writes much better songs now she's old and ropey and nobody's paying attention anymore, but it doesn't matter because she's old and ropey and well, you know.

If the guys from Maroon 5 weren't in Maroon 5 they would totally not being having any luck with those hotties in the karaoke bar.

In the 1980s video directors thought that jaggy pixelation was cool, but history has proven them wrong.

Where's my home delivery Thai got to?

I'm so glad I don't do powerful hallucinogens anymore because that Jamster gummibear ad, man, that'd do some real damage.

I worry that Green Day are so political and everything now, which is cool and all, but fellas, spare a thought for the groupies. Those Goth chicks in 'Minority', they look lonely and kinda hacked off with all the baton twirling, and let me tell you, goth chicks, despite what Luke says, they got a whole lotta loving to give.

Not emo chicks though. God, what a train wreck.

And... holy crap! Van Halen got fat.

Fergie, normally I'd deduct points for the stupid hats and the doofus with the Mohawk and the dungarees... but... oh what the hell just One More Chance. As long as you ditch the mope with the tatts. You know where to find me.

I wonder if that guy from Scissor Sisters is gay? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I reckon the guys from Maroon 5 might have told the guys from Coldplay about how if you're in a band and stuff chicks will like go out with you, because those Coldplay guys, man, they got brutalized by the ugly stick. I wonder if that's why the lighting is always so dim in their vids.

Hmm. It looks like Jimmy Barnes and Jack Marx were separated at birth.

In forty years time rap will be just like jazz and blues now, a once great black musical school reduced to an audience of pathetic middle-aged white guys desperately reaching for the last lingering threads of their imaginary street cred and wondering where the hell their massaman beef got to.

I've watched that Destination Unknown vid about two hundred times now and I still can't figure out what the pornographic marching band hotties have got to do with anything, so I figure I'll probably just have to watch it some more.

Hey Depeche Mode. Those haircuts. Embarrassed much now?

In some distant future in an old people's home somewhere, geriatric wrinklies will shuffle and shake their bony butts to Barnesy and Pearl Jam and U2... oh, wait, that's already happened, but scientists call it the Triple M network.

Man, Devo were even bigger freaks than I remember.

I wonder if Justin Timberlake wakes up every day and goes, "Whoah, did I dodge a bullet or what!"

You're gonna love it out in Ipswich. It's a grand life out there for a relocated public servant. All that extra space to grow some added toes, maybe a second head or three. Hundreds of pubs along the main drag, all with up to date sluicing systems for washing out the blood and teeth which do tend to accumulate during the lunchtime drinking hours. Vast, rolling, dusty plains of redheaded, cross-eyed cousins to marry. A bucket of coal for every ratepayer or registered borough worker. Plenty of...

Oh, sorry? What's that? You don't know what I'm talking about?

Ah, that's because you don't read the business press my ignorant and soon-to-be displaced friend. If you did, you'd know that the Property Council of Australia has been lobbying the gummint and specifically the new deputy premiersaurus, the Minister for Potholes, Congestion and Tumbledown Bridges, ol' Puddin'head Lucas, to round up thousands of sleepy, slow moving public servants, currently clogging the CBD and, well... get rid of them. Move them on. Put them somewhere else.

The Property Council likes this idea because large, carnivorous private enterprises could then rush in to the fill gaping ecological niche in the recently deserted office space, paying higher rents, wearing snappier clothes and generally lifting the tone of the city and fattening the wallets of its members.

The Puddin'head likes the idea because when he stares from his high office window in the morning it occurs to him that half of his congested, potholed roads and tumbledown bridges are not nearly as congested as they could be. To wit, those leading out of the city hardly seem used at all, lending their potholes and crumbly bits a neglected, mournful appearance that does nothin' to lift the spirits of a Puddin'head as he sips at his morning Milo and thoughtfully ponders the wherefores and the what-to-do's of such a perplexin' situation.

"You drive in in the morning and you will see very few people going back the other way," he told the Fin Review recently, when you weren't watching. "That's a waste."

And a Puddin'head does not like waste, oh no he does not, for what is the use of building so many potholes if they are just to be used by some of the people half of the time when it is in the very nature of a hard workin' hole to be open for business all of the time?

Of course, the Beattmaster, when he was still around, very quietly said nothin' about moving y'all out to Ipswich, but seeing as how as all the land in the other direction is filled up with bogans from Logan, and seeing as how the centre of poor old Ippy is just sitting empty, with nothing to do now that the council's moved everyone over the river - don't ask, it's an Ipswich thing - well, you couldn't really blame a Puddin'head for pondering on the amazin' juxtaposition of such things could you? Especially not now that a Puddin'head is that much closer to Supreme Executive Power and thus able to do something about it.

So, as somebody who grew up there, and just loved it, really, loved it to death, my heartiest congratulations to you all. Don't forget to drop into the Ulster Hotel and say hello to everyone for me. (They don't do food there but you're free to pick up a chicken and chips from the Red Rooster next door). And if you do hang around after work to cut some laps, make sure you drive up Limestone Street and down Brisbane. It doesn't work the other way, no matter what the Puddin'head might tell you about the mysteries of counter flow traffic.

And don't worry if you feel a bit out of place at first.

We've got something in the water up there, and you'll grow some new toes in no time.

It's possible the boys, rather than any huge police presence, defused the ugly atmosphere building during APEC

We owe the Chaser boys an apology. You might recall we gave them a bit of a touch up here at Blunty a while back for piking out and apologising when they took a bit of damage over a skit that upset the Jewish Lobby.

Well, the apology wasn't nearly as abject or wholehearted as was first reported, it was more of a John Howard style statement of regret, for any hurt feelings, if anyone had been such a delicate sucktooth as to be offended in the first place. It was the sort of apology you offer the evil dean in Animal House for bonking his daughter and trashing his campus with a really awesome toga party.

But given the pounding they've taken in the local press for the internationally celebrated APEC motorcade stunt, isn't it time somebody stood up for them? They get paid for taking the wee-wee and if there was ever an event in desperate need of some wee-wee siphoning it was APEC - or rather the category five hurricane of bluster and pompous bullshit which surrounded Sydney's preparations for the event, specifically the security arrangements.

They embarrassed a government and security apparatus that badly needed embarrassing given its ludicrous chicken-little brain spasm over the prospect of violent protest. But quite possibly, as was pointed out by a letter writer in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Chasers, rather than any massive police presence, probably defused the ugly confrontational atmosphere which was building in the city. This was best illustrated by the video of that poor bastard who got spear tackled and mauled in front of his young son, before being detained for twenty-two hours, for attempting to cross the road and buy a sandwich at the wrong time.

The Chasers punctured the arrogant narcissism which marked the security arrangements, exposing them to well-earned ridicule and the harsh braying laughter of a whole nation. Or most of the nation anyway. For some reason, the Herald, which mostly chose to cover APEC as a traffic congestion story, suddenly whipped itself into a storm of indignation over the Chaser motorcade and has been hammering them ever since. Even Sam de Brito, whose blog I much admire, and whose phat traffic stats I covet, lined up to put the slipper in.

The motorcade was a joke, as Julian Morrow said, that went horribly right. And it's just possible that without it the police might have been dealing with a much angrier, more resentful mob during Saturday's rally. The ABC may have received nearly three hundred complaints about the naughty little boys, but on the other hand, an estimated two million viewers were expected to tune in last night to watch them.

I think they done good, real good. But as always, you'll have your own opinion.

Was his best good enough? Or was it that you just couldn't come at the alternative?

So, the Beattmaster is gone. Or at least he will be once he's cleaned out the stationery cupboard, photocopied his butt, made a few international phone calls and given the parliamentary beer fridge a bit of a nudge.

He's over it, he says, and that's fair enough. Even Genghis Khan probably woke up in the ol' yurt one day and went, "Oh man, not more looting and burning and driving my enemies before me... and... oh man, enough with the lamentations of the women already!"

Like Genghis, the Beattmaster would like to be remembered as a bloke who did his best, even if, in reducing his enemies to piles of bone and ash, he made the occasional boo boo, you know, pillaged the wrong village or its duly elected council, spiked the odd innocent head on the wrong rusty spear, allowed the purely atypical employment of a homicidally incompetent doctor in a somewhat overburdened health system, lost more than the usual number of Ministers to criminal investigations.

And without a doubt the awesome power of the government's fully operational publicity Deathstar will power up over the next few days to blast into white hot photogenic atoms any suggestion of rebellion against or reinterpretation of The Beattmaster Legacy.

But, try as they might, the punters will have their own thoughts. A lot of them wanted to give him a fearful kicking at the last election, and the rain of their hobnailed boots on his carcass was stayed only by the prospect of replacing him with a pack of inbred yahoos and barely functional organ banks who lacked the cognitive capacity to chew their food and raise one hand at the same time - the basic skill set of your entry level Parliamentarian.

So, today, what I think counts for nothing around here. I missed a lot of his time in office anyway, being too busy surfing and racking up some awesome high scores on my games console down in Bondi. Friends who stayed behind sometimes complained about the power going off and the roads getting busy, and the water possibly running out sometime real soon, but I wasn't here so I didn't much care.

Perhaps you were and you did. Or perhaps you were part of the Mexican tsunami that rolled north over the Tweed and helped to define everything that happened here in the last ten years.

In the end, the Beattmaster relied on you to keep him in office. His big hope before the last election, the one where he should have been stomped on general principles, was that enough people would recognise what a tough gig it was managing such explosive, transformative growth.

Well, did you? Was his best good enough? Or was it that you just couldn't come at the alternative?

Who do you people think you are? I see you're at it again, coming on all gimlet-eyed and thin-lipped with poor old Network Ten, threatening to boycott any of their advertisers who displease you by spruiking their wares during Californication, and all because the opening scene featured a dream sequence of David Duchovny being orally pleasured by a winsome nun.

What's up? You don't think nuns should have a little fun too? You noticed how few of them you got left? Perhaps the promise of a little stick time with Mr X-Files might even help your cause. It's gotta be more appealing to your target demographic - you know, teenaged girls and young women - than the life long prospect of cold showers, a vow of poverty, and heaps of all too enthusiastic birch bark floggings by Mother Superior for bareback riding the vibrating washing machine down in the convent laundry room.

You know, if you don't like it, you got a perfectly good censor button right there on your remote. It's called the off switch. In fact, you got a whole bunch of them. Turn over or turn off because I got some sour news for you preachy gimps, not everyone is as easily offended as you. In fact, some of us are vastly amused and entertained by Mr Duchovny smoking dope and having sex and generally behaving in manner we'd all like to become accustomed to.

I'm hacked off with you, but I'm even more hacked off with Holden and Holeproof for pulling their ads from the series at the first whiff of grapeshot from the good ship lollipop. So here's a plan. How about you sanctimonious hypocrites - yeah, that's right, don't think I haven't been paying attention to all the extracurricular nookie you and your kind have been scoring - how about you get the hell out of my lounge room and TV pit and don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out. And Holden? And Holeproof? Why don't you grow a pair and kick these losers out of your place of business and pay some attention to the ratings for this show.

It's killing them in the AB demographic and you are losing that market because you've folded like a cheap Chinese umbrella the minute a bunch of sock and sandal wearing, closet case control freaks have whipped out the rosary beads. Put your ads back on... in fact, go one better. Make some new ads with sexy blowjob nuns in them, and I guarantee you'll more than make up any sales lost to the bible thumpers. They all wear those spiky chain mail undies and drive cheap, imported people movers anyway.

In fact, I'm so pissed off I'm going to watch Californication two or three times next week and buy one product from every advertiser with the jewels to say no to godbothering busybodies.

Does anyone remember all that big talk about Sydney being all growed up back in 2000 when it hosted the Olympics? Does anyone else remember what an insufferable ho she was, flashing her spangles at everyone, showing off way too much silicone, and generally letting the whole world know what an utterly fabulous bit of scruff they were so very lucky to be rubbing up against?

Does anybody else feel that far from being all growed up, our most mature, sophisticated and only truly global city is in fact behaving like a bit of sullen teen over this APEC gig? She's like, "Omigod Australia, like how many of your skeevy world leaders do I have to put up with traipsing through my bedroom and messing up my stuff, and using my things and oh no is that like the President of Chile hitting on Sapphire and Brianna I mean omigod its just so gross and..."

A few years ago the city would have put its hot mouth all over APEC, leaving those poor world leaders with hair mussed, pants down and a dreamy look on their dials that would have lasted until they realised their wallets were missing.

Why has Sydney lost its mojo so badly?

Has the time come to bitchslap this vacuous, self obssessed ditz of a city and say, "Grow up, princess. It's not all about you."

So you've been a bit put out by a couple of fences going up for a couple of days so that a bunch of stinky, dreadlocked protestors won't get to flash their nasties at Dubya and the Rodent thereby shocking them into an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and endorsement of Kyoto. Get over it. You're scoring a free holiday. The whole world is watching you, which is like, your natural state of being, at least in your dreams.

Are you a grown-up or not? Are you a global city or not? Are you important? Do you matter? Are you even good enough to get this gig?

The Games are over baby, have been for years and I dont know if anyone told you, but you looked kinda pathetic running down Athens just so everyone would remember how fabulous you'd been.

Unless you want to end up looking like some, sad, pathetic, parochial little backwater might I suggest you get off your arse, put on a decent titty frock, roll out the door and start shaking your booty like you actually mean it.

You've got guests coming, Sydney. Guests who are looking for a good time.

In this fast-paced go-go world of ours some issues are too important to be left to the ham-fisted, half-arsed witless hysterics of so-called web journalism. But that's too bad. Because that's all John Birmingham has. He's unfair, unreasonable and often unbalanced but in a good way. Words are weapons, and this weapon is a Blunt Instrument.

What makes this city tick? And what need be said, no SHOUTED, to keep it ticking in a true direction? Well-versed wordsmith Rupert McCall rides the undercurrent of a passionate notion all the way to the answers. Rhyme or reason? He'll let you be the judge...

The Magic Spray is a Monday sports column that affronts your senses like Dencorub to the groin. Like its real-life counterpart that's cured countless corked thighs, it may leave you feeling slightly numb, dulling the pain of another working week.

Mother, wife, housekeeper and family diplomat Heidi Davoren does a lot of laundry. She can peg a line full of undies quicker than George Bush can duck a flying shoe. For those of you who battle the mundane and ridiculous on a daily basis – school fees, preservatives, family budgets, soiled pants and banana stains – gorge on guilt-free parenting advice here.

For those who think gossip is a dish best served scalding, there's no need to wade through the magazines or cyberspace for the grittiest pop culture news. Because Georgia Waters has done that for you. She takes the celebrity world for the madness that it truly is. And it's enough to make a starlet choke on her silver spoon.

It's the blog that tackles the serious issues that impact on the lives of Queenslanders. We'll take on the bureaucracy; question and challenge the decision makers; put pressure on the movers and shakers and stick up for the little guy.

Babes in Business are Brisbane women that stand out in a crowd. Not only are they business owners, entrepreneurs, movers and shakers, they are wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters and daughters. They'll give working women throughout the city the best tips on striking the balance between work and home life.

Regarded as history’s best female surfer, Layne Beachley is a seven-time world champion. But her drive doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. She's had success with her Beachley Athletic and in 2006, Layne staged the richest event in women’s surfing. Recently retired, Layne has turned her focus to investing in Australia’s future by inspiring young women to realise their full potential with her Aim For The Stars Foundation.

Sam de Brito has spent more than a decade writing for TV, film and newspapers. In his first book, No Tattoos Before You’re Thirty, he offers advice to his unborn children. In his latest offerings, The Lost Boys and Building a Better Bloke, he takes the pulse of Aussie manhood. Now it’s your turn as he expounds on the business of being a bloke.

James Cameron has been designing menswear for the past decade. In this time he has witnessed more than his fair share of trends and fashions, most of which should never have involved men, but men and fashion should not be mutually exclusive. There are a few guidelines every man should know and follow and still hold on to their masculinity.

Have a computer or IT problem or issue? Then just Ask Chris Thomas! Chris Thomas founded Westnet in 1994, and today runs Technical Support for the mid-tier Internet Service Provider. Chris has helped Westnet win countless awards for customer service in the ISP space.

Clive Dorman is one of Australia’s most experienced travel journalists. Every week for 17 years his column Travellers’ Check dealt with travel consumer issues. His weekly column now returns online looking at travel intelligence: where the value is, what to do, using the collective information-gathering of you.

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Josh on Vegan maddies:Straight, male, vegetarian here.
Some very harsh generalisations you have there John.
Who cares that they didn't m...more